The Thrill of a Great Steak House Isn’t the Food. It’s the Theater.

In the steakhouse, employees hone the art of performance. There are crisp white linens, the overattentive server, the small comb-size steel blade that said server periodically drags over the tablecloth to decrumb the crumbs that may or may not exist. The presence of the crumbs is not important: It is the act of the decrumbing, the blade’s being scraped over the table, a routine that anyone with sanity would never…